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Flush and don’t forget: Beyond building toilets India needs to make sure they are usable and their waste is properly treated

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Flush and don’t forget: Beyond building toilets India needs to make sure they are usable and their waste is properly treated

Today we observe the 17th United Nation’s World Toilet Day, widely viewed as an attempt to inspire people to make behavioral changes and to tackle the global sanitation crisis. In this context the Modi government has impressively moved towards achieving Open Defecation Free (ODF) India by building millions of toilets. The thrust towards eliminating open defecation lies not just in building toilets, ensuring their accessibility, bringing in behavioural changes but also in the bigger task of managing faecal sludge. Open defecation has long lasting impact on human health as human wastes destroy ecosystems when returning to the environment untreated.

Let’s discuss some key challenges that stare starkly at us today. The Swachh Bharat Mission plans to achieve safe sanitation for all by 2019 with a well-defined process, for the different phases of the mission, across the sanitation value chain – Build, Use, Maintain and Treat (BUMT). These efforts are commendable and need to be sustained beyond 2019.

Nationally, we generate a staggering 38,000 million litres a day (mld) sewage. Existing treatment capacity can only treat 12,000 mld and this facility is available only in the metropolitan cities. Most of our sewage treatment plants (STPs) are severely under-utilised due to poor functionality of sewerage networks. On top of which there are no systems in place to safely dispose the bulk of the solid waste, a byproduct of these STPs. Nearly 80% of this sludge – human excreta and water mixture that bears disease-carrying bacteria and pathogens – remains untreated and is dumped into drains, lakes or rivers, thus posing a serious threat to the ecosystem.

The decentralised non-sewerage faecal sludge management system (FSM) is a solution to this problem. Successfully adopted by several countries in Southeast Asia, FSM involves collecting, transporting and treating faecal sludge and septage from pit latrines, septic tanks or other onsite sanitation systems.

Currently, the waste is collected by private operators, who empty the sludge using vacu-trucks and dump it in the nearest open space, giving way to infections since the untreated sludge comes back into human contact either through the soil, or through untreated contaminated water.

FSM requires all stakeholders to collaborate closely. The government needs to continuously provide technical assistance for managing sludge and also rope in citizens towards achieving this objective. With appropriate training, sanitation workers can be empowered to own and run FSM businesses – much like the producer cooperatives of the agriculture sector.

The fear of pit filling and pit emptying manually is another challenge faced in achieving open defecation free India. It is important to change the mindset among people whereby they trust that pits can be handled with easily available technologies as proposed in the FSSM National Policy document.

The sludge is nutrient-rich. The waste, after treatment, can be given to farmers for use as organic compost. It can even be treated and used for biogas, or to manufacture fuel pellets or ethanol. While FSM is advantageous at many levels, perhaps the most significant benefit that improved sanitation offers is public health.

Cleaner water bodies mean reduced incidence of water-borne diseases and reduced mortality linked to diarrhoeal diseases – especially among children less than five years old. We lose nearly 1,000 children under five years of age a day to poor sanitation. The World Health Organization estimates that 50% of childhood malnutrition is associated with recurrent bouts of diarrhoea, which is often due to unsafe water, poor sanitation and hygiene.

In the last five years, 28.3 million toilets were constructed as per the records of the Swachh Bharat Mission. We still need to build 84.7 million toilets and ensure that the existing toilets are in usable condition to make India ODF. Besides governmental support and campaigns for bringing in behavioural changes in communities, more complex issues such as access, support and sustenance of the toilets have to be firmly addressed. Responsibility does not end with building more and more toilet rooms. Rather we are also tasked to develop an access and upkeep plan for “safe toilets for all”.